Only the music of John Cage could have led to a performance as peculiar as the one that closed Friday night's concert in the Fine Arts Building's eighth-floor studio of PianoForte Chicago. The program was the first in a five-event "festival" observing the centennial of Cage's birth. Its highlight was the landmark Concert for Piano and Orchestra, in which Cage allowed any number of players on any number of instruments to fill any amount of time with nearly any...

Choreographer Bill T. Jones has a restless mind. The man who created the confrontational "Last Supper at Uncle Tom's Cabin/The Promised Land" - which gathered nearly 50 naked Chicagoans of all ages and sizes onstage at the Civic Theatre in 1992 - also won a 2010 Tony Award for the Broadway hit "Fela!" In early 2012, Jones took on John Cage in "Story/Time," which makes its Chicago debut Thursday at the Dance Center (which advises the work "contains...

Choreographer Bill T. Jones has a restless mind. The man who created the confrontational "Last Supper at Uncle Tom's Cabin/The Promised Land" - which gathered nearly 50 naked Chicagoans of all ages and sizes onstage at the Civic Theatre in 1992 - also won a 2010 Tony Award for the Broadway hit "Fela!" In early 2012, Jones took on John Cage in "Story/Time," which makes its Chicago debut Thursday at the Dance Center (which advises the work "contains...

Wednesday is the 100th anniversary of one of the oddest events in the history of classical music - the near-riot in Paris during the premiere of Igor Stravinsky's "The Rite of Spring. " The modernist score for ballet shocked and disturbed the audience, inspiring hisses, heckles, whistles, thrown objects and fistfights in the aisles. Here are 10 facts, with nothing falsetto: 1 Paul Wittgenstein, brother of philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein, lost his right arm while serving in the...

John Cage, the American avant-garde composer whose convention-defying music infuriated audiences but whose aesthetic ideas exerted a profound impact on world music of the 20th Century, died Wednesday at St. Vincent's Hospital in New York. He would have turned 80 on Sept. 5. Mr. Cage suffered a stroke Tuesday and was rushed to the hospital where he died Wednesday afternoon, according to his agent, Mimi Johnson. Over more than a half-century as musician, philosopher, teacher, writer and...

"I have nothing to say, and I am saying it. " John Cage's often-quoted line popped up toward the end of the final concert of the Northwestern University Bienen School of Music's John Cage Festival last weekend. In three packed days of performances and symposia, during which scholars and musicians pondered the composer's ideas, impact and influence, his modest declaration cut in several directions. Nothing is never really nothing, Cage...

Yes, he's 75, an age when most folks are settling into the golden years, but it probably comes as no surprise that composer John Cage is still merrily launching frontal assaults on the musical establishment. What else would one expect of a man who has spent a lifetime scoffing at some of the music world's mostly dearly held traditions? "I`ve just found a new way of writing music," says Cage, apparently still bristling with the spirit of innovation that long ago made him an object of ridicule among...

John Cage has been dead 20 years, but his music, his revolutionary ideas about art in general and his enormous influence on composers, musicians, artists, dancers and contemporary aesthetic attitudes, live on. The benign guru of the postwar avant-garde was the most controversial composer of his generation - branded a clown by some, a revolutionary genius by others - and clearly one of the most widely influential creative minds of the 20th century....

Ultra-contemporary and eerily other-worldly composer John Cage has at long last written his first opera, "Europeras 1 and 2," and its recent American premiere was the unquestioned highlight of this year's Pepsico "Summerfare" music festival held on the campus of the State University of New York here. But in attempting to discuss or even describe this unprecedented musical event, one is prompted to recall Mark Twain's remark on Richard Wagner: "His music isn`t as bad as it sounds."

The centennial of the birth of John Cage last month brought many commemorations nationwide though few as challenging as the one offered Saturday night at the Museum of Contemporary Art by the institution's resident group, the International Contemporary Ensemble (ICE). Full appreciation of the program demanded almost as much from the audience as the performers, and even listeners familiar with the issues behind its organization could have benefited from more help than the...

Two workers, muscles straining, are hauling a massive abstract painting by Cy Twombly across a main hall of the Museum of Contemporary Art. But they're not preparing to hang an exhibit; they're part of it. During each day of "Rolywholyover A Circus," created by the late composer John Cage, staff members can be seen rehanging, removing or adding art works according to directions from a random computer program. With its unpunctuated title, taken from an exclamation in James Joyce's "Finnegans Wake," the show...

Only the music of John Cage could have led to a performance as peculiar as the one that closed Friday night's concert in the Fine Arts Building's eighth-floor studio of PianoForte Chicago. The program was the first in a five-event "festival" observing the centennial of Cage's birth. Its highlight was the landmark Concert for Piano and Orchestra, in which Cage allowed any number of players on any number of instruments to fill any amount of time with nearly any...

Wednesday is the 100th anniversary of one of the oddest events in the history of classical music - the near-riot in Paris during the premiere of Igor Stravinsky's "The Rite of Spring. " The modernist score for ballet shocked and disturbed the audience, inspiring hisses, heckles, whistles, thrown objects and fistfights in the aisles. Here are 10 facts, with nothing falsetto: 1 Paul Wittgenstein, brother of philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein, lost his right arm while serving in the...

The Dance Center of Columbia College has played host to Merce Cunningham's troupe in Chicago every other year since 2003. "He really set dance in whole new directions," said Dance Center department chair Bonnie Brooks. "More than anyone before him, his work was an inquiry into human movement itself." The Dance Center will again host the Merce Cunningham Dance Company this fall. Cunningham performed with the troupe at the Harris Theater in 2003, reciting a narrative...

Merce Cunningham was arguably the greatest, most pioneering and widely influential contemporary choreographer of the past half-century. He was a seminal artist whom fellow choreographer Bill T. Jones called "the champion in the struggle to say that dance is its own primary language, with its own agenda and criteria." Cunningham died Sunday at his home in New York. He was 90. Cunningham challenged nearly every assumption about how dances are made and perceived. "Dancing is a spiritual...

The Human Factor (Borah Bergman, Soul Note). Pianist Borah Bergman draws on the work of Cecil Taylor, even John Cage. But he also has affinities with Ornette Coleman. That, to my ear, gives his work a saving shapeliness that makes its complexity worth penetrating. Here he plays duets with drummer Andrew Cyrille. They are as sweet as his own composition, "When Autumn Comes," and as grainy as John Coltrane's "Chasin' the Train."

It turns out that classical 20th Century music isn't as highfalutin as one might think. Alex Ross, music critic for The New Yorker magazine, pointed out on Saturday that "difficult" modern sounds permeate mainstream pop culture, consorting with the likes of Jack Nicholson and "Friday the 13th." Ross, in town for the Chicago Humanities Festival, offers these examples: 1. "2001: A Space Odyssey." Director Stanley Kubrick begins the film with Richard...

Ellsworth Snyder was a remarkable pianist who, like the better-known David Tudor, specialized in contemporary music. A composer to whom he was close was John Cage, so while the fascinating show at Rosenthal Fine Art is of greatest interest for paintings and collages by Snyder, it also presents works by Cage, including his earliest in a pictorial medium. Snyder, who wrote the first dissertation on Cage's music and premiered several of his piano pieces, was encouraged to...